A forum for associates to speak out about law firm issues

How to take vacation without using your vacation days – Part 1

Welcome back! I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. This week, we continue the theme that we started last week: vacation vacation vacation. If you read my post from 11-24-09, I talked about how to invest your vacation days so that when you depart your firm, you’ll have created a very nice golden parachute for yourself. If you haven’t read that post, read it first and then come back to this one. If you have, you’ll know that part of the investment process requires that you actually “save” up your vacation. But how does one not use vacation time and still relax on the beach in Maui with a cocktail of one’s choice?

Let’s use this past week as an example. Let’s say that your family (all from Boston and New York) decided to get away to somewhere warm and did in fact spend its Thanksgiving holiday in Hawaii. About two months earlier, when you were on the phone with your parents planning out the trip, they mentioned that the ten-hour flight each way was long, so if the whole family was headed to Hawaii, it would only be worthwhile if everyone could extend the Thanksgiving holiday by a few days. Despite protests from you that your firm needed you and you had tons of work to do, your family overrules you and the vacation is set: you depart from JFK on Tuesday, November 24 and return on Monday, November 30 late at night.

Tomorrow, when you go into work after a week of R&R in the sun, you sit down to do your time. If you are like most associates, this is what your time sheet looks like:

11/24/09 (Tues): 8.0 hours –> vacation

11/25/09 (Wed): 8.0 hours –> vacation

11/26/09 (Th): 8.0 hours –> holiday

11/27/09 (Fri): 8.0 hours –> holiday

11/30/09 (Mon): 8.0 hours –> vacation

If you did your time this way, you’ve just used 24 hours of vacation, the equivalent of three days’ salary! But you’re probably still dreaming of luaus, lush rainforests, and roasted pig and don’t really care about the fact you just used several vacation days. I mean, after all, aren’t vacation days supposed to be used?

Yes, but only as a last resort! Why burn vacation hours if you don’t have to? Save up for the golden parachute!

Let’s see how we can shave off some of that time. First, the easy one: does your firm calculate vacation hours based on a seven or eight hour day? If it’s a seven hour day, you should only be billing seven hours (max) per day to vacation. Don’t assume that a work-day is based on eight hours! There, you just shaved off three precious vacation hours already:

11/24/09 (Tues): 7.0 hours –> vacation

11/25/09 (Wed): 7.0 hours –> vacation

11/26/09 (Th): 7.0 hours –> holiday

11/27/09 (Fri): 7.0 hours –> holiday

11/30/09 (Mon): 7.0 hours –> vacation

What else can we do? Let’s look more closely at this past Wednesday, November 25. Usually, firms let staff leave early on Thanksgiving eve. If the office is closed at noon on November 25, that means the firm has declared it a “half” workday. In other words, you are only obligated to put in 3.5 to 4 billable hours instead of the normal 7 or 8. So in our example above, you’ve just shaved off another 3.5 hours:

11/24/09 (Tues): 7.0 hours –> vacation

11/25/09 (Wed): 3.5 hours –> vacation

3.5 hours –> holiday

11/26/09 (Th): 7.0 hours –> holiday

11/27/09 (Fri): 7.0 hours –> holiday

11/30/09 (Mon): 7.0 hours –> vacation

From our original example of expending 24 hours of vacation, we’ve shaved off a whopping 6.5 hours! You’re probably thinking to yourself, “That’s it. There’s nothing else that can possibly be done.” In fact, there is more, potentially a lot more. It may be possible, in fact, to shave off the remaining 17.5 hours of vacation, so that even though you are in Hawaii for a full week, you won’t use any of your vacation time. Not a single minute. What’s the catch?

There is a catch, but it’s a teeny-weeny one. You have to work one-tenth of an hour each day for three days while you are in Hawaii. How hard is that? If you read one e-mail or letter from opposing counsel or a client on each of those three days, you can now legitimately bill 0.1 hours to your case. You can do that in your sleep. Almost literally. If that seems wrong, you haven’t been working at a law firm long enough. I’ll talk about the art of rounding in a future post, but for now, think of it this way: partners love it when you bill. They want you to bill. If you are spending any time thinking about the case, reading a letter–however trivial it may seem to you, it’s still work. And all work should be billed. Because that work, your time translates directly into dollars into the partners’ pockets.

But, you say, how can this be right? If I can bill 0.1 hours on any vacation day and never call it a vacation, I’d never have to use any vacation days? Exactly. Believe it or not, there are law firms out there that only count a day as a vacation day if you can’t account for even 0.1 hours of billable work. For these firms, using the 0.1 hour method allows you to accumulate vacation hours like no one’s business, and you should do so without hesitation. I’ll continue the discussion this week to discuss two additional topics: (1) Why is the 0.1 method actually the fairest policy for a firm to calculate associate vacation? (2) If your firm doesn’t permit the 0.1 method, what are other ways to save up on vacation time?

The moral of the story is, once again: get informed! Find out the details of your firm’s policy toward vacation time. Is it based on 7 or 8 hour days? Does the firm have a 0.1 method policy? Talk to senior associates who have hopefully already thought about these issues.

To those associates out there who just took a week-long vacation this past week and didn’t use any vacation time, congratulations!

Congrats man! It is a nice feeling fixnig someone else’s stuff. I am sure you won’t have any problems with sales, you seem to do a great job in the Class putting things in layman’s terms for us. Best of Luck